A&S Teaching & Learning Community of Practice: A Model for Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Institutional Collaboration for Undergraduate Students

Presented by: Faculty of Arts & ScienceZoom RegistrationPresenter: Jasty Singh, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream; Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies; Department of Immunology, Temerty Faculty of MedicineDescription: Immunology is a cross-disciplinary field, existing at the interface of biology, engineering and medicine. Therefore, a crucial skill for immunologists to develop is their ability to collaborate with others who have vastly different expertise and skillsets, such as biomedical engineers and statisticians. Two undergraduate courses, IMM360 (Scientific Methods and Research in Immunology, UofT) and BMEG372 (Biomedical Materials and Drug Delivery, University of British Columbia), were knit together in September-December 2022 and 2023. We will present our scaffolded approach for promoting collaboration on a cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional project. Furthermore, we will report student attitudes towards cross-disciplinary collaboration, which were assessed via surveys both at the start and end of the collaborative project. We hope that learnings from this work will inform an effort to weave cross-disciplinary collaboration throughout other undergraduate programs at the University of Toronto.